Randy Leonard isn’t the only problem facing Portland’s food carts.

Gregg Abbott is perched over his Samsung Android at a wooden picnic
table outside his Whiffies Fried Pies truck, parked in a vacant
Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard lot called Cartopia. It’s a Monday
morning—his day off—and Abbott is anxious to move under the heating
lamps of nearby Tiny’s Coffee. He’s had his fill of sitting out in the
cold.

If food cart chefs are Portland’s new rock stars, then Abbott
is Keith Richards. His rise is the stuff of local legend: In May 2009,
he quit his job parking cars at RingSide Steakhouse to start deep-frying
half-moon pies—filled with barbecued brisket and cheese, salmon and
chipotle mayonnaise, or marionberry preserves—in a 1994 Wells Cargo
trailer. That summer, the food cart lot Whiffies Fried Pies shared with
french-fry purveyor Potato Champion became a nightlife destination, as
tipsy partygoers munched the perfect drunk food until 3 in the morning.

Whiffies now serves a hundred customers a night. Its Twitter
feed has 3,491 followers. Abbott has been filmed for segments on the
Travel Channel and NBC Nightly News, and last month was asked by Gordon Ramsay to try out for the Fox cooking-competition show MasterChef.

But like many young rock stars, Abbott hasn’t seen the royalty checks.

“If I really took the time to figure out how much I made per
hour last year, I would for sure burn my cart to the ground and join an
ashram in Northern California somewhere,” Abbott said.

Plenty of cooks would love to take his place. Food carts have
clustered at the edges of parking lots in Portland’s downtown for the
better part of a decade. Thanks to government zoning laws less
persnickety than those in other cities that require food trucks to drive
home at the end of the day, Portland’s theoretically mobile kitchens
have paid rent to parking-lot owners to serve $6 pad Thai from
permanently parked trailers—creating miniature dining districts on the
sidewalk.

But in the past two years—and especially this summer—the
carts have spilled across the Willamette River, expanding eastward like a
small-business soufflé, or some kind of foodie Manifest Destiny. Carts
with names like Starchy & Husk, Kim Jong Grillin’ and Crème de la
Crème began serving macaroni and cheese, Korean barbecue and escargot
from parking spaces in boutique cart pods—empty lots that might have
been construction sites in a more robust economy.

In the midst of a recession, new cart owners have created a
shadow economy—one that’s young, hip and adored by the national media.

The Multnomah County Health Department counts 609 food carts
in the county as of Nov. 30—148 more than this time last year. In 2001
there were just 175.

Fifteen of the city’s 25 cart pods opened in 2010, 11 on the
east side, says Brett Burmeister of Food Carts Portland, a website that
covers the cart scene. An informal survey by WW last week shows
that while most downtown carts are still owned by first-generation
immigrants, less than 10 percent of the carts in eastside pods are.

Two weeks ago, City Commissioner Randy Leonard took notice of
the cart boom—and said some of it was illegal. Declaring that carts in
two downtown pods had added decks and patios that “no longer make them
food carts but illegal restaurants,” Leonard ordered inspectors at the
city’s Bureau of Development Services to crack down on code violations.

But Leonard’s attention isn’t the only trouble looming for
food carts. Winter has arrived, and Abbott isn’t optimistic that the
more than 600 carts will still be open in the spring.

“There are a lot of factors right now that are going against
food carts,” Abbott says. “It’s my hope that the wave of people who are
like, ‘This is an easy way to make a million dollars,’ is cresting. It
might be over now. We’ll see how these things shake out, but starting a
cart in December is a really, really tough way to get going. My guess is
that by February there are going to be a lot of carts for sale on
Craigslist.”

Other food cart owners agree. After a summer of media love,
they’re exhausted, jaded and not much wealthier than they were when they
opened their windows. And they share the same worry: Maybe Portland’s
cart craze has gone too far for its own good.

“I think the cart thing got a little out of control, to be
honest,” says Kevin Sandri, who runs the Garden State cart in the North
Portland pod Mississippi Marketplace. “I think too many people came to
the party. And somebody called the cops. Usually, somebody needs to call
the cops.”

*

Randy Leonard was driving into downtown off the Morrison Bridge
last month when he noticed El Masry, an Egyptian food cart on the corner
of Southwest 3rd Avenue and Washington Street. But it wasn’t owner
Gharib Sameia’s kofta kebab that caught his eye. It was the deck.

“I saw a guy out there building the biggest of the
structures, out there on the corner of 3rd and Washington—up on the roof
on a Sunday afternoon,” Leonard said. “And I thought to myself, ‘I’ll
bet he’s doing that on a Sunday in order to avoid running across any
building inspectors.’ And it was within a week that Channel 2 was in [my
office] saying, ‘Do you know about all these structures?’ And I said to
them, ‘You know, I actually saw a guy working on one of them on a
Sunday, and I have to say I wondered.’”

Long before KATU’s report last month on illegal decks,
Leonard had been warned of possible code violations at downtown carts.
Last November, he told WW that fire officials had complained to
him about faulty wiring and propane tanks at two lots—on Southwest 3rd
and Washington and Southwest 4th Avenue and Hall Street—but he
instructed them to concentrate on more urgent violations.

“The running joke is that planners get upset about the carts
[across from Development Services], and then they walk across the street
and get a burrito and they are not upset anymore,” Leonard told WW
last year. (The Leonard-managed Bureau of Development Services sits
across from the cart lot on Southwest 4th and Hall—where the Taqueria la
Nortenita caught fire and burned down in August 2009.)

For years, food cart owners have operated with little interference from building-code inspectors.

Food carts get two Multnomah County Environmental Health
Department inspections a year, the same as traditional restaurants, but
cart owners say those are the only government officials they’ve seen at
their door, apart from those ordering lunch. (Food carts have no higher
rate of food-poisoning complaints than traditional restaurants, county
health officials say. In the 2009 fiscal year, only two of 137
food-illness complaints in the county were against carts.)

The lax enforcement has been an open secret. In August 2009, Mayor Sam Adams bragged to the Toronto Sun that Portland’s food cart wave had been aided by an absence of red tape.

“We have worked really hard to stay the hell out of the way,” Adams said.

Leonard, a former firefighter, says he changed his tune when
he noticed the decks—constructed from cedar or pine and covered with tin
or corrugated PVC roofing—jammed next to propane tanks. And he says he
took action only after vendors flouted his order last month to stop
building.

“They had been given fair warning to do something about it,
and their reaction was to build more structures,” he says. “I gave the
personal warning myself.”

Both parking lots are operated by Greg Goodman—one of the
city’s most powerful property owners and a personal friend of
Leonard’s—who charges up to $500 a month in rent for each cart. (Goodman
owns the 3rd and Washington lot; the 4th and Hall lot is owned by the
family of City Commissioner Dan Saltzman.)

Leonard says if one of the wooden decks caught fire, it would be more than a blaze.

“If it would just be a bonfire, that would be one thing,” he
says. “But it would be a bonfire with rockets. Because those propane
bottles are long and narrow, and when they catch on fire, they shoot off
like a rocket. They’re more like a bomb. They would be very hazardous
in fire conditions. In other words, the Fire Bureau would potentially
have to back off and evacuate the whole area.”

Leonard and BDS officials hosted a meeting with 75 cart
owners last Wednesday, telling them they could either remove the decks
by Jan. 3 or begin an extensive building-permit application process. For
those permits to be approved, says BDS enforcement manager Mike
Liefeld, “the code requires some kind of anchoring.” Goodman, who
attended the meeting, told cart owners they would not be allowed to
drill into his parking lots.

“That’s going to be a problem,” Liefeld summarizes.

Sameia, whose El Masry cart first caught Leonard’s eye, says
he’s going to apply for a building permit anyway. His cedar deck cost
$2,000 to $3,000 to erect, he says. It’s painted red, and decorated with
Christmas lights and a tapestry featuring three camels.

“They think it’s dangerous,” says Sameia as he dices
cucumbers. “I don’t see how it could be dangerous. This was my dream.
I’m asking for the City of Portland, especially Mr. Randy, to help us.”

Sameia, who moved to Portland from Suez, Egypt, 22 years ago
and opened his cart this spring after jobs at Nike and an auto
dealership, says he didn’t check city code before building the deck.

“I went to the parking-lot management and I asked if I needed
to go to the city to get a permit,” he says. “They said, ‘No, you don’t
need to.’ If it’s against the law, I don’t even want to step in it. But
the manager said, ‘You’re fine.’”

Goodman confirms to WW that he will not allow any
drilling on his properties, and says his City Center Parking never
received any design proposals for patios.

“Did we know somebody was putting a porch in? Yeah,” Goodman
says. “But we did not knowingly tell somebody to do something we thought
was illegal.”

While Liefeld says BDS will continue to investigate only the
lots they receive formal complaints about, Leonard promises that he will
send inspectors to all the cart lots in the city.

One they haven’t looked at yet is the Goodman-owned lot on
Southwest 10th Avenue and Alder Street, where deck building is as
rampant as on the cited lots. At least one cart has constructed
permanent structures—a tin roof and a marble countertop—with holes cut
out to accommodate existing trees.

Sunny Souriyavong, who owns 10th and Alder cart Sawasdee
Thai, says she built a $3,000 roofed deck in March after receiving
permission from the lot manager.

“I’m kind of scared,” she says. “I feel sad and terrible. It
seems like, you put it up Monday, you have to take it down on Saturday.”

Even as Leonard enforces the old rules, policymakers on
multiple levels of government are promising new ones. The Oregon
Department of Human Services is expected to meet with county officials
in January to discuss updating policy to meet Food and Drug
Administration food codes for mobile units. The Portland Fire Bureau
says it is writing a new food cart policy as well, focusing on propane
tanks, shock hazards and exits.

Abbott, whose Whiffies truck is parked next to a tent strung
with white light bulbs (both legal, if they’re up less than 180 days a
year), says code enforcement is overdue.

“Even the other food cart owners see that it can’t be an
utter free-for-all,” Abbott says. “As cart owners, we should get
together and have a serious dialogue about what is going to continue to
let us have the sort of freedom that we’ve had, and not get somebody
squashed by a falling structure.”

*

Abbott obsesses over the minutiae of the food cart business. His
BlackBerry has an RSS feed that tells him whenever a new Portland food
cart appears on the Internet. He spends 30 minutes every day tracking
the prices of food carts being resold on Craigslist.

“Nobody spends more time thinking about this,” he says.

Since April, Abbott has been scheduling monthly meetings with
a small group of other cart owners, including Garden State’s Sandri and
Potato Champion’s Mike McKinnon.

Other owners in town sometimes refer to the group as the Food Cart Mafia.

“It was clear from about a year ago this was coming,” Abbott
says. “It was clear we might bump up against the Restaurant Association,
it was clear that sooner or later the city had to enforce some of these
code things. And with anything that gets popular, there are detractors
that will find reasons to increase the cost of entry. Regulation is
really about increasing the cost of entry so that it’s more difficult
for people to get into these games. It’s super cool to be involved in a
field where the cost of entry is low, and people get to bring out their
wild ideas and take them for a spin without risk of ruining their lives.
Increasing that cost of entry would bum me out.”

The major regulatory cost of opening a food cart is a $340
annual Multnomah County Environmental Health Department fee—along with
initial costs of a $290 plan review, a $100 business license and several
other small fees. Even though most of them are stationary, food carts
don’t pay the city’s system development charges—infrastructure fees that
can run well into the thousands of dollars. And that makes restaurant
owners livid.

“They’re not operating within the scope or intent of any of
the laws,” says Bill Perry, director of government relations for the
Oregon Restaurant Association. “These guys are not paying transportation
development fees; they’re not paying sewer or water fees. What happens
when a restaurant that’s right next door to them—say, a sub shop who had
to pay all those fees—they open up a second unit and say, ‘I’m not
going to pay the fees, because you’re not making them’? If they go try
to enforce it…at some point, somebody’s going to have [grounds for] a
lawsuit.”

David Stokamer, owner of three FlavourSpot carts serving
waffle sandwiches and coffee, says he doesn’t have time for a fight with
restaurants—he’s busy trying to make a living.

“I’m kind of wondering who’s going to have the time and
wherewithal to fight this battle,” Stokamer says. “You know, the grass
is always greener. Someone with a restaurant is looking out their window
and they see all the food carts across the street, and there’s people
standing there waiting for lunch—it’s like, ‘Oh man, I wish I was those
guys.’ And this time of year, you’re sitting in your trailer and you’re
freezing your ass off and you’re thinking about rent and it’s raining
out and no one’s standing outside on line, and you’re looking at the guy
across the street in the restaurant, saying, ‘Man, I sure wish I had a
roof.’”

While code enforcement and restaurant backlash are hot
topics, most food cart owners say they have bigger fish to fry. Their
most immediate problem? Winter is coming, customers are going, and the
summer bubble of carts has left too many of them packed together in
places where nobody’s walking by.

It’s “free cheese Friday” at Crème de la Crème—no additional charge
for Gruyère, Brie or blue cheese on French dip sandwiches—but business
is slow at the Good Food Here pod on Southeast 43rd Avenue and Belmont
Street. Business is slow every day now.

“It’s dropped off, I’d say, 700 percent or so,” says Bianca
Benson from the kitchen of Crème de la Crème, a 1961 Ford B600 school
bus she and her husband, Michael, renovated into a kitchen serving
French specialties like croques-monsieur and escargot. “There’s days
where we’re lucky to pull in $100.”

Crème de la Crème was the first of 17 carts to open at the
Good Food Here pod this past July. During the summer, Benson says, she
averaged sales of $800 a day. Now, she’s lucky to take in $800 a week.

Benson says her lease continues until next July, and she’ll
decide then if the bus is viable for a second year. (Making matters
tougher, that $340 Health Department bill comes due in January.) She’s
hoping the crowds gawking at Christmas displays on nearby Peacock Lane
will stop by, and she’s selling handmade necklaces at the window for
extra income.

“I’ve started making jewelry to extend my lemonade stand,”
she says. “I’ll seriously have to do some re-evaluating, and I think a
lot of people will.”

Matt Breslow, who runs the Grilled Cheese Grill out of two
buses on Northeast Alberta Street and Southeast Ankeny Street, doesn’t
think some carts will last that long.

“A couple of my friends that I work with, we have [betting]
pools to see, ‘You think they’ll make it to Thanksgiving?’” Breslow
says. “’They made it to Thanksgiving. You think they’ll make it to
Christmas?’ Some of them are still going. And frankly, some of them
aren’t.”

Abbott says the problem isn’t that Portland has too many
carts, but that the eastside pods were developed under the assumption
that the more carts there are on a lot, the more rent gets paid to the
property owner.

“You can’t have 20 carts on a lot,” Abbott says. “Downtown
you can, because you have 15,000 people walking past every day. But if
you have 85 people walk past the cart pod every day, and 3,000 people
drive past, how many of those people do you think you can get to stop
and come in? And those developers develop those lots with the idea that
they’re going to have 15 people paying the rent every month.

“But if your business plan revolves around the fact that you have
15 carts,” Abbott continues—he’s building up steam now—“and you need 12
of those carts to pay the rent every month to keep the nut paid, and
only five of them can be successful, then even those five of them are
going to have to go find some other place. The basic underlying business
plan doesn’t make sense.”

Abbott has delivered this lecture before: He told it to the
Vancouver, Wash.-based owners of Cartopia when they wanted to add more
carts to the Hawthorne pod earlier this year. “We said, ‘For every cart
that you put on this lot, you have to bring us another 150 people a
day.’”

Neeley Wells, who manages the Good Food Here pod for Urban
Development Partners (monthly rent starts at $500), says the developers
are still figuring out the ideal number of carts.

“During the summer, [17] was a good number,” she says. “This
is our second month of winter. We certainly wouldn’t throw in the towel.
People love eating there—they just wish it didn’t rain so much in
Oregon.”

Yet new cart lots keep opening. A pod called Q-19, on the
site of shuttered pool hall Cheers NW on the corner of Northwest 19th
Avenue and Quimby Street, is seeking eight carts to sit outside a full
bar in the building. Mississippi Marketplace owner Roger Goldengay has
purchased a property in outer Southeast Portland on the Springwater
Corridor Bike Trail. And this summer, real estate
brokers-turned-developers Michael, George and Nicholas Diamond tried to
recruit 20 cart owners to an indoor food-cart palace in a building on
Northwest 14th Avenue and Flanders Street in the Pearl District—a kind
of artisanal food court. That project is now “on the fence,” Nicholas
Diamond says.

“When is the end of food carts going to be?” Stokamer asks.
“The end of food carts is going to be when someone’s standing in a
parking lot, in the freezing cold and rain, waiting 10 minutes for an
$11 sandwich. And they just kind of say, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?
How good could this sandwich possibly be?’”

The summer cart bubble already shows signs of deflation.

About 18﻿ carts have closed or changed ownership this year,
according to Food Carts Portland. Carts that opened in eastside pods are
moving back downtown—there’s more regulation there, but also more foot
traffic.

“As many carts from the east side that can find a spot
downtown, are going to find a spot downtown,” Abbott says. “And you’re
seeing it already. Wet Hot Beef, Chili Pie Palace, the Frying Scotsman:
All these guys that started out outside the downtown area are moving
toward downtown.”

Food cart owners are starting to consider contingency plans.
The owners of East Burnside cart VolksWaffle shopped their Volkswagen
Vanagon on Craigslist last month before deciding to concentrate on
catering gigs. Sandri plans to start driving his Garden State cart to
different locations each day—he thinks Portland’s days of stationary
cart pods are numbered, and the food trucks will take to the roads, as
they do in California and his native New Jersey.

“You’re going to see things go truly mobile,” Sandri says.
“That’s what I’m going to do this coming year. I’m going to start to
phase the parked cart out. With the rules and regulations, honestly, I
think some of the downtown carts are going to become a thing of the
past, sadly enough. And I think the landlords on the east side, they’re
going to perhaps start charging a little bit more, a little bit more, as
there’s fewer legal lots. It’s going make it seem a little more
realistic to open a brick-and-mortar [restaurant], because I don’t think
the costs are going to be that different.”

Abbott expects less-dedicated cart operators simply to quit.

“I think you’re going to see some of these lots split into
smaller lots, and some of these guys try their hand at a different
hobby,” he says. “The people that are passionate about it are going to
continue to do it for the crumbs. Because there’s nothing like being
here at 2 o’clock in the morning and seeing 200 naked people riding
bikes into your lot.”

Abbott says he’ll stick it out. He’s added ice cream to his Whiffies menu. He isn’t trying out for the MasterChef
appearance. (“I would make ice cream and pies until they figured out I
was a one-trick pony and sent me home.”) Whiffies doesn’t pay him more
per hour than parking cars did, but it’s his business.

And Cartopia is his home.

“I got into this game because I was bored, depressed and
lost,” he says. “I needed some sort of community to be a part of. This
lot became my whole community, even before I owned a cart here. I
thought for sure this was the worst idea I ever had in my whole life,
opening this food cart, and it was going to lead to financial ruin. But I
was hoping that along the way I was going to meet some new friends. It
was exactly what I needed.”

"In the low usage areas, we found that our vehicles sit idle four times longer, ultimately affecting overall vehicle availability for the Portland membership base, as well as parking for the Portland community."

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